In the last four decades, shopping centers have become more prevalent as ways and means for selling. A more recent elaboration is the siting of such centers so as to include rows of shops which face one another across an acrade, closed walkway or mall. Such centers are becoming known as shopping malls. Beside retail sales stores, tenants of units in such malls include such diverse operations as restaurants, banks, movie theaters, coin laundries, public libraries, light manufacturing facilities, local governmental offices, community agencies, data processing offices, and real estate agencies. References to "stores" and "customers", etc. herein should be taken to include the comparable terms for all mall uses.
In order to site more mall selling space in less space on the ground, some shopping malls have been built on more than one level. However, one level of, for instance, a conventional two-level mall is generally so sited that it is more easily approached from the street; that predisposes a greater traffic density for one level of the mall than the other and makes merchants less desirous of being located on one level than the other. That adversely affects the potential profitability of a mall from its owner's viewpoint. Tenants of multiple-level stores in such conventional two-level malls are faced with how to keep their "front door" sales displays on the malls' secondary level from presenting too "low fashion" an appearance to be compatible with the store's intended image, or in "wasting" some of their best displays in a relatively low traffic region.
The invention grew out of a study aimed to equalize advantages of various tenants of a multiple-level commercial mall to be built so as to integrate therewith, as an anchor store, a new department store having an entrance at grade in such a manner as to avoid need for substantial modification of that preexisting store.